Category: Student Voices

The following blog post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Sarah Freeman-Woolpert.
This past winter, I traveled to Bosnia and Herzegovina to conduct interviews for my senior thesis on how divided ethno-national identity affects collective youth activism and civic engagement in Bosnia today. With funding from the Sigelman Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Award, I spent two weeks interviewing young activists and university students about methods of youth engagement with the country’s current socio-political problems, like a 60% recorded youth unemployment rate and the corrupt, ineffective political system divided along ethno-national lines.
Traveling during the holidays gave me an intimate lens into the lives of local people who hosted me during my stay. I was welcomed warmly into the homes of many families who treated me as a member of their family during their holiday celebrations. I spent New Year’s Eve in the divided city of Mostar, in an unheated house with an older couple. Together, we huddled under blankets and had a long, wonderful conversation despite not speaking more than a few words of each others’ language. A week later, I spent Orthodox Christmas with a family in East Sarajevo. We ate roast lamb for breakfast, then I lay around watching the Kardashians with the family’s two teenage daughters.
At the end of my trip, I had recorded 16 hours of interviews and gained a more nuanced understanding of the issues facing young people in Bosnia today, and the ways youth engage with these problems—or choose not to engage at all. But I also left with a deep appreciation for the local culture and customs, which has influenced my desire to return to the region after graduation. I plan to continue researching inter-ethnic youth relations in post-conflict societies to get at the heart of how conflicts perpetuate between generations, addressing the roots of disagreement to prevent these from transforming into future violent conflict.

The following post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Kathryn Coté.
As a biological anthropology major, I was interested in studying skeletal material as part of my senior thesis.  Fortunately, the National Museum of Natural History has some of the largest skeletal collections in the world, and it’s only a few Metro stops away from campus!  Receiving a SURE Award offset the cost of my many Metro trips to the collections and allowed me to conduct research in forensic anthropology at the Smithsonian (thus furthering my endless quest to become Temperance Brennan from Bones).
For my thesis, I chose to study a method that uses morphological changes in the acetabulum (the socket on the side of the pelvis that articulates with the femur) to estimate age-at-death in adult skeletal remains.  The method was originally developed using a predominantly white male population, but research suggests that the acetabulum is highly population dependent as an age-at-death marker.  I calculated the accuracy of the technique across populations and sexes using black and white individuals in the Smithsonian’s Terry Collection in order to determine whether the method was broadly applicable.
Surprisingly, the method was equally applicable across sexes and ancestries.  Percent accuracy did not vary to a statistically significant degree between black females, black males, white females, and white males.  This is most likely due to the broad age ranges that the method uses to classify unknown remains.  However, with such broad age classifications and an average percent accuracy of 46.6%, the method remains insufficient for use in a medicolegal context, despite being equally applicable across groups.
Conducting independent research has been an extremely rewarding experience that has allowed me to organize every step of the research process.  I was responsible for conducting a literature review, identifying a quantifiable gap in the literature, designing an experiment to address this gap, finding researchers who were willing to support my project, efficiently carrying out my experiment, and interpreting my results.  This experience has allowed me to hone my research skills and I am extremely grateful to everyone at the UHP and NMNH that made this project possible.

The following post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Simon Wentworth.
I have always had an interest in genetics, and when my Intro Biology professor freshman year mentioned he was going to be doing work sequencing and assembling the Genome and Transcriptome of the Fathead Minnow I decided to go up and talk to him about it. Little did I know right then that this would be the start of my research career. The next week Dr. Packer offered me a position taking care of the hundreds of fish he had under various treatment conditions. Shortly thereafter he asked me if I wanted to stay on longer term to head up the Transcriptome work for him. I immediately accepted and since then have spent the bulk of my time in the lab teaching myself the various software needed to assemble and annotate a complete transcriptome. Eventually I got access to Colonial One (GW’s supercomputer) and it was off to the races. I spent the remainder of my freshman year and the summer following working on establishing a high quality and stringently annotated transcriptome for a single reference organism of our fish. After working on my research for over a year it was finally ready to present, but the lab didn’t quite have the funds to send me to the conference.
Honors program to the rescue! I applied for and got the SURE Award which allowed me to fly to the American Physiological Society’s Grand Conference in Omics in San Diego to present my work, “Transcriptome profile of the gills of the fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas),” over three days. While I was there I not only got the opportunity to share the work I had been doing, but I was also able to see what others were doing and what was considered at the forefront of physiological omics. Surprisingly enough, the keynote was working with other related fish doing much of the same type of research as I was. In fact, it convinced us to take the work we have been doing further to begin to look at the genetic changes which occur that allow the Fathead Minnow to acclimatize to a variety of different clines of environmental conditions.
It was a wonderful experience to be able to present among so many others at large conference and I am extremely thankful for the support of the UHP that made it possible for me to present there.

The following post was written by UHP student and SURE Award winner Laura Schwartz.
This year, I’ve been working on an original research project in the anthropology department on culture, race, and breastfeeding. I spent two years working as a work study employee at the Breastfeeding Center for Greater Washington. While I worked there, I learned a lot about the culture surrounding breastfeeding – it’s a whole separate world that most people know nothing about. But it’s also a complicated world. To people who have never been parents, the idea that breastfeeding is more than just baby + breast = successful feeding might be completely foreign. Lactation support is a hugely important area that combines aspects of peer assistance with the health care industry. The Center, and other organizations like it, provides both supplies (such as breast pumps, nursing clothing, etc.) and appointments with lactation consultants, who are certified medical professionals who specialize in breastfeeding. Though it’s still off the radar of many, the field of lactation support is both crucial and growing.
Unfortunately, not all mothers have equal access to breastfeeding support, and that’s what my research is all about. Although breastfeeding rates in the US have been rising in recent years as more evidence comes out about breastmilk’s health benefits for babies as compared to formula, there are still many mothers who are not breastfeeding. In particular, African-American mothers’ breastfeeding rates are significantly low compared to other mothers in the US. I’ve spent the past six months asking mothers of all races at the Breastfeeding Center about their breastfeeding experiences in surveys and interviews. I’ve paid special attention to African-American mothers and whether the factors that lead to their decisions to breastfeed are different from those at play for mothers of other races. Within my (small) sample, it looks like there are some differences, particularly involved with the degree to which breastfeeding is normalized within different communities. There may also be differences in level of access to resources such as peer support. In addition, I’m examining insurance coverage of lactation support, which have recently been expanded under the Affordable Care Act. Finally, I frame all of these results within the wider culture of breastfeeding, which is extremely interesting to analyze from an anthropological perspective.
The UHP SURE Award was instrumental for me, even though everything I needed funding for was pretty unglamorous. With the UHP’s help, I was able to pay for photocopying of multi-page surveys to administer at the Breastfeeding Center. I also purchased a paper shredder to protect the privacy of my participants. Although these expenses seem minor, it would have been really tough for me to cover them myself, so the fact that the UHP Sure Award covered them for me was a huge deal as I was trying to get my study off the ground. I’m really proud of my original research, and I’m grateful to the UHP for all the help they’ve provided, both in the form of the SURE Award and otherwise!